COVID-19 is clearly a life-or-death crisis, but so is climate change

Climate change has a certain macabre poetic quality.

The foundations of a voracious endless growth economy — fossil fuels — are destabilizing the planet’s fundamental functioning; the burning of fossil fuels is destroying what allows us to survive.

For decades, environmentalists, scientists and Indigenous people have tried to sound the climate change crisis alarm.

Taking action to mitigate our fossil fuel addiction, and challenge our singular focus on perpetual economic growth, has been intensely difficult. Climate crisis? What climate crisis?

Four months ago, the first hints started to circulate of a novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China.

In the weeks since, we have seen a devastating virus take several thousand lives and cause many more people to suffer.

We have also seen a leap to action in the name of mitigating harm. The virus, which has been declared a pandemic by the WHO, has caused entire communities to be quarantined; airports to shut down; travel to be restricted; daycares, schools and universities to close; sport seasons and music tours to be suspended; workplaces, restaurants and bars to be shut down; and financial support to be offered for lost wages.

Climate change communicators have long known the challenges of sharing the climate crisis.

Early climate changes, often identified by people living on the land such as Indigenous people in Canada’s north, were far from most of the world’s population.

To most of us, the climate change threat was always somewhere in the future. The consequences of climate change — such as extreme weather — were widely challenged as even being related to climate change.

From the moment it started, the novel coronavirus has been deemed a crisis. Even after decades of research and warnings, climate change struggles to be seen as the devastating and deadly crisis that it is.

Yet the burning of fossil fuels is destabilizing the very foundations of life on the planet.

Admittedly climate change has not been as dramatically abrupt as COVID-19 and thus can be harder to grasp.

However, ever more frequent and extreme fires, hurricanes, droughts and floods have brought climate change devastation to all of our lives.

These events have meant the loss of human and animal lives, the loss of human and animal habit and most frighteningly, threaten the systems that make life on earth predictable, pleasant and possible.

“Flatten the curve” has become COVID-19 parlance. We accept that there are people who will contract the disease, and we do everything that is absolutely within our power to diminish the rate at which people become sick.

Climate change scientists, activists, Indigenous people have all tried to tell us for decades to flatten the CO2 curve. We know that we will burn fossil fuels, but we can do everything within our power to limit the rate at which we do that.

COVID-19 has shown us what the global community is capable of when we take a crisis seriously, including examples of actions and restraints that have actually lowered CO2 emissions.

In her 2019 address to the U.S. Congress, activist Greta Thunberg called climate change “the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.”

COVID-19 does not change this designation, but it does show us what taking action can look like.

Jennifer Good is an associate professor of communication, popular culture and film at Brock University in St. Catharines.